Republican Field Woos Iowa Evangelical Christians

WAUKEE, Iowa — Nine declared or likely Republican candidates descended on a large church in Iowa on Saturday to court evangelical Christians, the voters who played the starring role in the state’s two most recent caucuses.

They included the winners of those two contests (Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee), newcomers whose biographies lend themselves to evangelical support (Ted Cruz and Scott Walker), and candidates who would like to win some support from the Christian right but are eyeing broad coalitions (Rand Paul and Marco Rubio).

The nine-candidate lineup in the worship hall of Point of Grace Church in Waukee, a Des Moines suburb, was proof of evangelical power in Iowa, but also a warning that the script may be rewritten in 2016, with so many candidates competing for social conservatives that their votes splinter.

“The problem for Christian conservative candidates is they’re all running in the same lane,” said Kedron Bardwell, a political scientist at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, who studies religion and politics.

Image

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida defended traditional marriage during an Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition event for potential 2016 Republican presidential contenders on Saturday.CreditScott Morgan for The New York Times

The speakers wooed the crowd, several hundred who were seated in steeply banked rows, with stories about the role of faith in their personal lives and pledges to support issues important to social conservatives, not only abortion and same-sex marriage but also a newly rising interest in security threats in the Middle East.

Many portrayed Christians as an increasingly persecuted community, seeking to appeal to the evangelical audience with vows to protect what they described as religious liberty for people of faith.

There were glimpses of personal biographies that are not the usual staples of stump speeches. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, told of moving back into his childhood bedroom after a career in the Air Force, when he felt lost, until he had an epiphany that “I was going to spend the rest of my life doing God’s work.”

“I just really never realized how large the pulpit was going to be that he was going to make available to me 30 years later as the governor of Texas,” he said.

Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, talked about how after losing a daughter to addiction, “it was my husband Frank’s and my personal relationship with Jesus Christ that saved us from a desperate sadness.”

And Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, said the most important moment in his life was not his wedding day or when he held his first child, but “the moment I found Jesus Christ.”

Although the percentage of Iowans who are evangelical Christians is no greater than the national average — about one in four, according to the Pew Research Center — they represent nearly 60 percent of the Republican caucus turnout. Their outsize influence in Iowa and other primary states has pulled the Republican field to the right in the past, especially on issues like abortion and immigration, and led critics to discount the caucus as harmful to the party’s nominee in the general election.

A number of the candidates were adamant about opposing same-sex marriage despite the view of some national Republican strategists that the party is losing touch with younger voters on the issue.

Mr. Rubio, a Florida senator, defended traditional marriage. “I remind people that the institution of marriage as one man and one woman existed long before our laws existed,” he said. “Thousands of years of human history teach us a simple truth: The ideal way to raise children is when a mother and father married to each other, living in the same house, raise children together.”

At a house party nearby earlier in the day, Mr. Rubio, making his first visit here as a declared candidate, indicated he would compete aggressively in Iowa. “We want to win the caucuses in this state,” he said.

Image

A prayer Saturday at Point of Grace Church in Waukee, Iowa, where potential Republican presidential contenders courted evangelical Christians. CreditScott Morgan for The New York Times

On the same night that leaders of the national press corps were dining in Washington with sundry entertainment celebrities, Mr. Jindal offered a message for “Hollywood and the media elite.”

“The United States of America did not create religious liberty; religious liberty created the United States of America,” a line that earned a standing ovation.

Mr. Cruz, the Texas senator, also used much of his speech to highlight the importance of religious liberty, and said that believers in traditional marriage must “fall to our knees and pray” between now and the start of oral arguments next week at the Supreme Court on a case that could legalize same-sex marriage across the country.

Speaking at a V.I.P. reception before the main event, Mr. Cruz spoke in blunt terms about Iowa’s role in the Republican presidential contest, saying caucusgoers must propel “a real conservative” to the nomination.

Mr. Paul promised to speak out on an issue as important to evangelicals: expanding restrictions on abortion. He described as a doctor holding a severely underweight one-pound baby, which fit in the palm of his hand, and wondered how abortion-rights advocates could agree it was a human being, but that an unborn fetus many pounds heavier was not.

“I think we can win this argument,” he said. “I plan to be a big part of it. I’m going to keep talking about it.”

Mr. Santorum, the winner of the 2012 caucuses, thanks to a plurality of support from evangelicals, surprisingly did not make an appeal on the expected social issues. Instead he spoke about foreign policy in the Middle East, harshly criticizing the Obama administration for pushing for a treaty with Iran aimed at slowing its nuclear program. He said that at meeting after meeting he held in Iowa this year, there was fear the country was not safe.

Promising to throw any such treaty in the trash on his first day if elected president, Mr. Santorum sounded an apocalyptic note. “I just hope,” he said, that by then “we haven’t put Iran on a path to a nuclear weapon and something cataclysmic hasn’t occurred.”

Mr. Walker, the last to speak, seemed poised to cement the support he already enjoys in Iowa, where he is on top of recent polls, with a lengthy story of unlikely coincidences involving an uplifting passage from a devotional book, “Jesus Calling,” which he read aloud to the rapt audience. It had been sent to him by a friend in case he lost his recall election as Wisconsin governor in June 2012. Instead, Mr. Walker explained, he ended up reading it to the widow of a dairy farmer whose husband died the Monday before Election Day.

The candidates were invited by the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition, a branch of the national organization led by the Christian political activist Ralph Reed. The group wants constitutional amendments prohibiting abortion and same-sex marriage, the elimination of the federal Education Department, prayer in public schools and new I.R.S. rules to allow ministers to preach about politics.